The Maury Island UFO Incident: The Story behind the Air Force’s first military plane crash (11 page)

Ray
Palmer would continue
over
the
years
to
adamantly
question
the
military
on
the
Maury Island Sighting.
Palmer
perhaps
wanted
to
assert
his
innocence in the whole affair or
deflect
his involvement
in
the
death of Capt. Davidson and 1
^st
Lt. Brown.

Raymond Palmer, the person who assigned Kenneth Arnold to the
case claimed that he had “Photostats of [Charles Dahl’s] hospital
record”
Palmer, Raymond. The Truth about Ruppelt’s Book Flying Saucers,
December, 1958 p.37

The “Father of Science Fiction,” Raymond Palmer was born in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 1, 1910. A healthy baby he was even
featured as a healthy toddler in advertisements. In 1917 at the age of
seven, his foot got caught in the spokes of a wheel on a passing milk
truck and his spine was so severely damaged that it would affect him
the rest of his life.

Palmer spent the next five years until age 13 in the hospital. He
educated himself.
A voracious reader, Raymond read as many as
fifteen volumes a day brought by the Milwaukee Library and became a
fan of Jules Verne, HG Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. In 1930, he
edited the first fanzine, “The Comet.” In 1938, he became the editor
of Amazing Stories. In 1948, along with Curtis Fuller, he founded Fate
Magazine. Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of “flying saucers” and the
Maury Island incident were featured in the first issue of Fate Magazine.
In 1957, he started Flying Saucers Magazine, which also featured a
serialization of “Coming of The Saucers” and other articles on the
Maury Island UFO incident.

Kenneth Arnold would later write of his reaction...from Palmer when
he sent him a letter dated June 26, 1947
“At the time had I known who he was, I probably wouldn’t have
answered his letter... It wouldn’t have been because he wasn’t a sincere
or a good man, but later I found he was connected with the type of
publications that I not only never read but had always thought a gross
waste of time for anyone to read.”
Arnold received a second letter from Palmer inviting him to write an
article. Arnold declined but sent Palmer a copy of the detailed report
and biography he had mailed earlier to the Air Force at Wright Field in
Dayton, Ohio.
On July 22th, Palmer sent Arnold $200 to investigate the Maury Island
Case.
Palmer later made a statement about the fragments

“How important was the original cigar-box of fragments sent to the
Chicago publisher by Dahl? Bear in mind that McChord intelligence
knew the exact pile of slag they had come from.
Yet when an
intelligence agent visited the Chicago publisher (asking questions about
the Shaver mystery primarily, and only casually mentioning saucers, and
being remarkably uninterested in the box of fragments which were
shown him, and certainly not recognizing the fragment being used as
an ashtray on the Chicago publisher’s desk), the box and its contents
were promptly stolen from the file cabinet in which the intelligence
agent watched the Chicago place it, the theft occurring that very night.
At least, the box was gone in the morning as the Chicago publisher had
expected, because he deliberately planted the whole thing to find out if
the fragments were worth taking.
Why a midnight visit to steal
fragments intelligence knew was only slag.”
- Palmer, Ray “The Truth about
Ruppelt’s Book” Flying Saucers, December 1958

Ray Palmer would be interviewed in
1977 by Guy Baskin and is staunch in his
belief in UFOs.
Palmer would comment in the interview:
“Kenneth Arnold fits into it and it’s his
30
^th
anniversary and strangely enough it’s
my 33
^rd
because I
knew about
flying
saucers
three
years
before
Kenneth
Arnold made his first sighting.

In describing Deros – “Briefly it was
about a radioactive flare from the sun
about 12,000 years ago which virtually

wiped out life on earth. While others left for other planets, the persons
left behind were called “abanderos” or “Deros” for short. The Deros
still had access to some technology, among them a “rolat” disk used to
go through caves controlled automatically. They traveled about 1,200
miles per hour.- Guy Baskin, 1977.

In an odd connection to the Maury Island
Incident, Ray Palmer is believed to have sought
out Arnold to also help further the stories of
Richard Shaver.
Shaver was a writer who had
written a successful series of what he claimed to
be true stories of
underground tunnels
and
humanoid figures called “deros” who would fly

underground crafts much like UFOs.
Ray Palmer first became familiar with Shaver in 1943 when he fished
out of the garbage a crumpled letter his Assistant Editor Howard
Browne had read for laughs and tossed. He would print Shaver’s
stories under the title “I Remember Lemuria.”
Shaver was a Pennsylvania steelworker who believed he could hear
voices and lived a life where he was in and out of mental institutions
but would end up becoming lifelong friends with Palmer.
When the Maury Island UFO Incident occurred and Arnold had his
sighting, Palmer would say that Shaver would exclaim, “See they [UFO
rolats] do come out of the caves!”

Ted Morello’s role in the Maury Island
Incident would prove significant. Not only
because Morello was an upstanding reporter for
Associated Press but because he would be able
to verify as a third party the calls by the
mysterious informant, the details related and
express an urgency to Arnold of his safety.

Ted Morello was born December 15 1918 and
died on July 15th, 2007 in New York City at the age of 88 following a
stroke.

Morello had resigned from the United Press sometime before 1948 and
had moved to Milwaukee. According to
Flying Saucers Over Los Angeles
Arnold called Morello and suggested that Morello “had been ‘eased
out’ of the Tacoma Bureau because he knew too much about the
disks”
Flying Saucers Over Los Angeles.

Morello
taught journalism at the University of Washington,
then
moved to New York where he began work in television and the making
of television commercials

He was a reporter for the United Nations from the late 1960’s on,
Morello was twice elected as president of the U.N. Correspondent’s
Association, the group he helped establish after the establishment of
the U.N. in 1945.
- Hasan, Khalid. “Veteran UN newsman Ted Morello dies.”
Daily Times July 21,2007

Seattle Times, Aug.2 1947
Sgt. Elmer Taff, one of the survivors of
the Kelso Crash was born on August
23rd, 1924 in San Saba, Texas. Taff had
left Fort Lawton on a 25-day furlough
and was hitching a ride to his home in
Mertzon, Texas on the B-25 bomber.
“I had just relaxed after takeoff when the
left engine burst into flame. I don’t
know what
caused the fire, but
they
strapped a parachute on me and pushed
me out of the plane”
“No he said, I’m not going to try for
another plane ride to Texas. This time
I’m going all the way by bus. They can
take all their airplanes—and keep them.

Landing several miles from the scene of the crash, Taff crossed 200
yards of farm land, awakened residents of a house there, and got a ride
into Kelso.
In an August 2 1947 article in The Seattle Times, he said, “he was
through with airplanes for all time…it was his first and he said last
flight.”
Sgt. Taff died in Columbia, South Carolina on October 6th, 2005. Taff
was a technician 4th grade station at Fort Lawton, in Seattle.